Americans are more likely to give their local public schools high marks for college preparation than for work-force training or for giving children basic skills to survive as adults, according to the results of an Associated Press poll released today.

About 61 percent of parents of school-age children and 54 percent of other adults said their local public schools did a “good” or “excellent” job of preparing students for college. Just 12 percent of such parents and 11 percent of other adults said their local public schools were doing a “poor” or “very poor” job in that area.

By contrast, just 55 percent of parents and 44 percent of other adults said their local public schools were doing a good or excellent job of preparing students for the work force, and just 48 percent of parents and 40 percent of adults in the general population said their local public schools were doing a good or excellent job of giving children the practical skills they will need as adults.

In an article summarizing the poll’s findings, the AP notes that substantial majorities of the respondents thought public schools were emphasizing the wrong subjects, with mathematics ranking at the top of the list of subjects they would like to see students spend more time on.

The poll found fewer than one in 20 respondents felt the United States was doing any better than “just keeping up” with the rest of the world in education, and more than eight in 10 thought the economy would improve if all Americans graduated from a two- or four-year college.

The poll, of 854 parents of school-age children and 833 other adults, was conducted by Knowledge Networks, a marketing-research company, with financing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. —Peter Schmidt